WASHINGTON, D.C. — In late 2023, the Forest Service Chief Financial Officer assembled the Automation Center of Excellence as a driving force for the agency’s push toward innovation and efficiency through the use of robotics process automation.  

In less than a year, the center, also referred to as ACoE, is managing dozens of idea submissions and working to put into production completed automations across the Forest Service to allow for more creative, mission-focused work.  

“We created ACoE to leverage technology and automate routine, repetitive tasks to run in minutes or less, replacing manual, time-intensive processes,” said Don Modder, associate chief financial officer. “Automating tasks can open up new, innovative ways to modernize their work and save employees’ time.”  

Deborah Butler, the center’s program manager, leads a small group of data analysts and project managers under the CFO who assess, evaluate and provide expert guidance for automation ideas submitted by employees from across the Forest Service. Ideas that make it into the project lifecycle process will have a center project lead work with the customer. The customer actively works with the center to implement an automation in one of four different ways:  

• Robotic process automation

• System-to-system automation

• Low-code automation

• Process enhancements

While challenging for Butler to choose a favorite project successfully deployed, there are certain projects she watched her team bring to life that improve employees’ ability to accomplish their work. Those projects include:

The Incident Memorialization Bot enhances the fire contract payment process by creating tens of thousands of individual obligations, which led to an annual cost avoidance of nearly $1.3 million. Additionally, the bot facilitates compliance with regulations and audit findings.

• The Travel Delinquency Reconciliation Bot generates automatic notifications to Forest Service employees with outstanding payments. The bot also notifies their supervisors. Running 12,000 reconciliations annually costs approximately $800,000—or 18,000 labor hours. The bot automatically sends bi-monthly notifications, savings an estimated $1.2 million in labor costs.

• The Travel Card Training Reminder is a tool that sends monthly reminders to 25,000 travel card holders, reminding them of their annual training requirements. Implementation of the tool has led to a 93% completion rate for mandatory training, avoiding negative repercussions for most affected employees, and has saved over $6,000 in labor costs.  

For more information, or to submit an automation idea to the ACoE, visit the ACoE internal website or send an email to sm.fs.acoe@usda.gov.